User:Andrewa/Why primary topic is to be avoided

In that all pages belong to the whole project, any user may edit this one. But it's generally more helpful (and polite) to discuss the proposed change on its talk page first.

There has been a great deal of discussion lately on the Wikipedia concept of primary topic, and to my great relief it recently survived my absence for a couple of weeks and still continues. There is interest.

Currently, many articles are at ambiguous names because it has been decided that the article topic is the primary topic of the ambiguous name. Many other ambiguous names redirect to an article for the same reason.

I still recommend abolishing the whole concept. But while that may be an impossible dream, there seems (to my surprise I admit) some chance that a lesser proposal might succeed.

So this essay makes a case for merely reducing the number of articles with ambiguous names.

The problem

For a more recent and perhaps better analysis, see User:Andrewa/negative benefit

Searching for an article

It is generally assumed that readers looking for an article will find it most easily if its title is a base name rather than disambiguated. But this is quite simply untrue. In fact they are more likely to be saved at least one mouse click if the DAB is at the base name.

Consider, for example, a reader looking for information on what they themselves call waves. If they are a physicist or even a school student of physics, they probably want wave (physics). If they are a surfer or sailor, they want wave (ocean). In both cases, they are likely to know that other meanings of the word exist, and in any case they are about to find out!

So they do a search (either within Wikipedia from our search box, or from a search engine website), say wanting the article on physics. Now suppose we have the article on physics at the base name (as we do, currently), and no redirect from wave (physics) (and under current policies and guidelines, there's no reason that we need to have one... we currently do in this case, but it's not obvious why). The results list contains many entries, but none of these can be identified as the article they want from its title. There's an article at wave, but no indication of what it's about. There may be a link to wave (disambiguation), but they have no idea what that means. And there are links to other articles as well.

Not very helpful, is it?

And there are other problems, see User:Andrewa/Let us abolish the whole concept of primary topic. But let us just deal with that one for now.

Existing links

The other way readers get to an article is of course by an incoming link. This may be of many forms, including a personal bookmarks kept in their browser, a link from another website, and even a URL which they find in a printed source. We have no control over these links, nor even any way of detecting them.

These links will be wrong if and only if the article they want has moved (or of course if it has been deleted, split, merged, rescoped...). They are a good reason for avoiding article moves.

The moves that matter are ones away from base names. Currently, an article is placed at a base name because it is the primary or only topic by that name. Incoming external links may then be created to that article name. There are two reasons that the article may later be moved:

• A change to a new primary topic, which is therefore given the base name.
• A change to no primary topic, so a DAB is placed at the base name.

In either case, any incoming external links are broken. In the first case, there may or may not be a hatnote directly to the correct article, but there will be to the DAB page. This results in one or two more mouse clicks for the person arriving at the wrong article. In the second case, there's just one extra mouse click, as presumably the correct article is listed in the DAB. So regardless, there's at least one more mouse click, and in some cases two.

And in the first case, there's also the prospect of another link-breaking move if this new primary topic ever changes.

Such link-breaking moves occur on a daily basis under the current system. They cannot be completely eliminated, as it is not always obvious at the time of article creation that the name is potentially ambiguous. But they can be greatly reduced in number. The vast majority of link-breaking moves would be avoided if primary topic were to be avoided in the first place.

Incoming links are never a reason for moving an article to an ambiguous name, or even for creating one at a name likely to become ambiguous. Rather, they are another good reason for avoiding ambiguous names, as these are the normal cause of link-breaking article moves.

Solutions

Always have a disambiguated redirect

This seems to be a no-brainer. If a term is ambiguous, but there's a topic at the base name, then there should also be a redirect from a disambiguated article title that explicitly and unambiguously identifies that topic, and this should be high up on the Wikipedia search results list.

There's not much we can do about other search engines, which may not list redirects at all.

Rename all the DAB pages

This seems another no-brainer. Use the term disambiguation as jargon within Wikipedia by all means. But a DAB should have a name like wave (list of articles) which all readers can understand, not wave (disambiguation) which is Wikipediarese.

When they see such a title on a search result list, readers will understand what it means.

The dreaded mouse click

It's interesting to note that, even if a reader does know (or guess) the meaning of (disambiguation), they still need one more mouse click and one more page load to get to the article they want than they would have if this article had an unambiguous name.

If the article had appeared on their search results list by a recognisable (unambiguous) name, they'd have gone straight there. Mouse clicks and page loads are minimised by the use of unambiguous article names. See User:Andrewa/negative benefit#For example primary topic for more on this.

But to read much of the discussion, you'd think it was the other way around!

Raise the bar

In most cases, the best solution is to give the article an unambiguous name. Parenthetical disambiguation is fine, so long as it obeys normal English language conventions, as are the the other means of disambiguation and for the same reasons. Readers can be expected to understand them.

There may be articles which cannot be adequately disambiguated. Perhaps ideally these would be the only ones at ambiguous article names.

Or perhaps we can't go that far. But how exactly should the bar be raised?

Consider both P T criteria

Much of the discussion has been about which of the two primary topic criteria is the more important. Sometimes, they give different results, so this priority affects the decision.

One way of resolving this is to consider P T established only if both of these tests support the same topic. The order then becomes irrelevant. This would also in practice raise the bar considerably.

No consensus

At present, no consensus on primary topic defaults to the status quo. But if there is no consensus, that itself indicates that there is no primary topic. Perhaps this should be the policy. There seems little to recommend the squatters' rights policy that currently exists.

That is to say, a topic should be considered primary only if there is consensus to this effect. If consensus changes and/or no longer exists, then the topic is no longer primary.

This would not mean that one editor who gives no reason could thwart discussion by forcing a no consensus decision. Yes, the strange argument that they could do so was actually put forward in recent discussion. But illogical and/or baseless opinions are discarded in assessing consensus of course, and a single dissenting voice would very rarely prevent assessment of a rough consensus in any case. They would need very strong arguments, and the close would still run a grave risk of being overturned as a supervote.

Never move an existing article to an ambiguous name

This again seems a no-brainer. An article already at an unambiguous name should only ever be moved to another unambiguous name.

Similarly, an article name likely to become ambiguous should never be used as the name for a new article.

But even if the concept of primary topic were to be completely eliminated for new articles and article moves, there would be a strong case for a grandfather clause to keep existing articles at ambiguous names, unless there were other reasons to move them (for example and notably, that the topic was no longer the primary topic, or even never was).

And there will be others

Watch this space.

History of the concept

Origin

The term primary was introduced to wp:DAB in 2002:

If the title clearly has one central most important meaning, and one or two lesser-known meanings in narrow contexts, one alternative is to have the full article about the primary meaning under the simple title, after which is a brief link to the special use. For example, the poker article covers the card game; it is unlikely that there will ever be an encyclopedia article on fireplace pokers... [1] (my emphasis)

Mobile computing, and even smartphones, existed in 2002, but were not widespread. Touchscreens for 'phones also existed but again were not widespread.

It is also worth noting that the article on fireplace poker was in fact created just four years later in 2006, [2] and has since been merged into fire iron but the resulting redirect is still at poker (disambiguation) of course.

And, that edit is just saying that P T is one alternative. P T only became policy/guideline later.

Development

if the title clearly has one central most important meaning, and one or two lesser-known meanings in narrow contexts, it is probably better to have the full article about the primary meaning under the simple title [3] (my emphasis)

"primary topic" disambiguation: if one meaning is clearly predominant, it remains at "Mercury", the general title. The top of the article is given links to the other meanings, or if there are many, to a page named "Mercury (disambiguation)". For example: the page Rome has a link at the top to a page named "Rome (disambiguation)" which lists other cities named Rome. The page Cream has a link to the page Cream (band) at the top. [4] From this it seems that having the primary topic at the base name is no longer optional, however the older text saying probably still appears in a later section

Creating a "Primary topic" disambiguation can prove controversial due to differing ideas on which is the primary topic. When the discussion on the matter descends into edit wars and wasted time and effort, some editors feel it is better to resort to an "equal" disambiguation page. This opinion is not shared by all. [5] Now the page has a guideline header, and is already controversial

And that's the story up until here

See also

• User:Andrewa/negative benefit
• User:Andrewa/Let us abolish the whole concept of primary topic my original and now largely obsoleted thoughts